The World in Brief
by Chaotic Serenity
Summary: A collection of five minute drabbles. Multiple pairings, multiple canons. Infrequently updated. New stuff: August 13, 2008
1. Other Side of the World

**Timeline:** Windwaker  
**Warnings:** PG - one disturbing image.  
**Characters:** Tetra  
**Theme:** The Hanged Man

Tetra's world is one of ocean; endless, stretching hands of sallow blue that swallow the world, bottom to sky, where even the clouds mingle with tides when the sun is high. She can't imagine this Hyrule, with its dust and its green and its heavenly firmament as anything more than fiction, the empty movement of whispers and the hope of people too small to bridge the great divide. Her world is too tremulous, too fractious for the rigidity of ground, the structure of forests and mountains and sky; she'd rather the boundless feel of a world in motion, spread out heavy and lifeless and unsure beneath her, like the sudden weight of the hanged man.

She built her dreams pitch to sails and stood steady as the mast - but love is the tar that held it together, and love of the world is what tore it apart. And goddess knows she'd like to levy blame where blame is meant to be but -

A ship without wind is dead on the water; it is better, she feels, to let it sink.


	2. Everytime The Wind Blows

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
**Rating:** G   
**Characters:** Link/Midna  
**Theme:** Word was "scent."

His days are stratified into sections of sight and smell: the brisk, anticipatory swell of morning, the sharp pummel of the noonday sun, the cold, anxious musk of night, with its pitfalls and mystery.

Somewhere she has a place, veiled in her shadows and her shame, huddled beneath all those intangible layers of that world that wasn't. He thinks of her only when the day is nearing its end, reclining to its rustic sfumato of twilight, and she is steady in his thoughts then, like the stream that pushes relentlessly to a dissipate point beyond the horizon.

And it not necessarily that the world is so old or so dark or so cold without her, but sometimes...

He wonders who casts shadows for her now.


	3. The Shadow of Diana

**Timeline:** Ocarina of Time

**Spoilers:** Regarding Sheik's identity.

**Warnings:** PG-13; mild adult references

**Theme:** The Moon

Under the moon, she is full and bright and brilliant and his.

He remembered her in Calatia, long after he'd sought to surpress the sound and magic of her castle town and its world of green pastures and rolling hills and pleasantries. Everyone was kind there, everyone honest - a world more false myth than reality, like the imperfect piece of a puzzle unbound, its jigsaw complexity more trouble than comfort. He wanted to forget her in ale, see the whisper of her memory tremble on the skin of a whore, dissipate and uncanny. He loved her best in his memory heavily bound under the wrappings of necessity and shame, a half-corpse boy with a world for his coffin, and he wanted her stagnant there, simple and pretty and nothing worth having.

He wants to forget _the trickle of her voice the curve of her ear the movement of hands on his face the press of her mouth against his skin thegirlunderthecloththatwasneverhis_ -

Under the moon, she is full and bright and brilliant and gone.


	4. Everything by Halves

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
**Warnings:** PG-13; mild adult references  
**Characters:** Link/Ilia  
**Theme:** The World

Sometimes she is sweetest when the morning is new and drifting over the land like the clumsy run of egg yolk. Sometimes she is sweetest when the moon is full and heavy and drunk on its dark, heady night wine. Sometimes, she is not sweet at all, but he calls her that anyway. She is best when she is ripe, fiercely happy and flighty and still somewhat girlish for all that she is woman, and they make quite a pair (since these days he feels like half a man).

He thinks of the world before and after her and in between, with the wolf's howl and the wolf's sharpness and wolf's smell, and he can't picture her in it, soft and smooth and spread beneath him with her hands fisting his hair and her mouth hard against his, but he wants to consume her all the same. (_And there is nothing bad about that_, she murmurs against his ear, _if she gets to have him all._)

Link breathes in the scent of twilight and breaths out the scent of day.


	5. Clumsy, Stupid Alice

**Timeline:** Majora's Mask  
**Rating:** PG  
**Characters:** Link  
**Theme:** Word was "drugs." Yes, those kind.

The stars were playing symphonies and sounding off horns when he first ascended; he strummed his fingers along the thin, striated harp of clouds and imagined him part of that choir as the clock began to wind down, its hands moving strained and stubbornly against the world he'd made sluggish.

In town of endless ticking, they had called him "child," and bar owners had tossed him to the streets, but the soldiers at the bridge had laughed to see his sword and told him that any boy who tried the blade was a man in their eyes, and they had shown him the way to paradise in the bottom of a tin cup.

He closed one eye and made a temporary kaleidoscope of the world, which spun under his feet with the rapid flair of a top, and fell to his back so he could watch the world fall apart. In his mind's eye, he could imagine the Skull Kid at the helm of his time-ender and fancied him a composer - how does one play to the apocalypse proper? - and the stars glittered dangerously and the moon smiled like a Chesire Cat, heavy and hot above him.

And tomorrow (tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow) the world is going to end and he will have to save it (again - but what does it matter, if everybody dies anyway?), but for now he is alone and the sky is firing off its ten gun salute at the fall of the curtain, and for one night, Link is as dizzy and empty and weightless as Alice in Wonderland, laid to rest in her valley of flowers.


	6. The Wait of Shadows

**Timeline:** Link to the Past  
**Spoilers:** Vague for the game.  
**Rating:** PG  
**Characters:** Molderm   
**Theme:** Word was "centipede." No joke.

In the land of the golden light, they'd called him centipede - a beast with a thousand arms and legs and made to crawl on his belly. In his thrashing, made lower than the snake, a wild rebellion of motives and limbs with no channel, no aim, no design. An incautious mistake of the divine, where even light could not squelch the shadows hidden in the cracks and imperfections of the creation act.

They had bound his world in borders in the tower they called "Hera," and there he had waited, volatile and impatient and tempestuous, for the master directive. If he'd had the mind to think, he'd have called it the agony of accidental life - made to linger in the world with no purpose. Torment begot anger which begot murder; tyranny became his colossal art. In his blind rage, he made a land of exile, where all who dared to wander never wondered again.

In the shadow of the land of the once golden light, in the centuries after the great fall, there are whispers of a darkness yet to come.

Moldorm waits.


	7. A Taste of Nothing

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
**Warnings:** PG-13 -adult content  
**Characters:** Link/Ilia  
**Theme:** flavors - vanilla

He tells her she smells like vanilla in the mornings; when everything is taking breath anew, she is sweet and simple and pure as snow. But he prefers her in the evening, when she is as sharp and hot as cinnamon, and he loves her best beneath him, his teeth against her neck and her nails on his back. She is quick to bring out the beast in him, and she can feel it creeping underneath his skin, closest to her heart when his hands are on her skin.

There is something living inside his - and she knows it, can feel it in the roughness of a kiss, the sweet agony of a thrust - and he guards it like royal treasure, behind closed doors and locked inside his soul along with all the love he keeps from her. She would like to make him tremble, make him quiver in her arms like a river interrupted, to hold him once and feel him flushed against her, the pulse of his heart in cadence with his own.

And sometimes she feels like a thief in queen's chambers, scouring to sell of the parts that make a whole, but she is tired of loving half a man, and while Ilia fears the animal under his skin -

She fears more the man she's never known.


	8. Stupid

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
**Warnings:** PG   
**Characters:** Ilia, implied Link/Midna  
**Theme:** emotions - stupid

Stupid, she thinks, while stripping the laundry from the line. Stupid, she whispers, while clutching broken glass. Stupid, she curses in the night, with her hands fisting her hair and her face hot against the pillow.

It becomes her mantra, invoking rage where blame sits heavy It levies its load on her heart along with the scraps and the bits he left of it - all of her memories and fond wishes and assortment of dreams a pile of refuse, scattered like dust to the wind or leaves to the fall, useless and lapsed.

She wants him eviscerated, all his sins and love poured out before him, all his vital pieces laid naked to her eye. Everything that is in him that is him or not him or wasn't him and now is; everything that is honest and forthright to everybody but her; all of his ramparts, his sentries carefully lining the walls of his heart, shot down and put to ruin before her.

The agony of inquiry burns her throat, stiffens her back, coarsens her tongue -

_Why did you leave?_ she wants to ask.

_Where are you going?_ she wants to shake him.

_Who is she?_ she wants to scream.

Stupid, she thinks, and laces her hands, tightens her corset, her smile, her heart, while life goes on.


	9. Full of Grace

**Timeline:** Ocarina of Time  
**Warnings:** PG   
**Characters:** Sheik (Link/Zelda by association)  
**Theme:** motherhood

He was born in a winter: that he remembered, between the cold and the shadow and the sudden self. All it took was a spell and a wish and a want, and out he came like a hatched bird, explosive and fragmented and new. This is not like human births - or he doesn't think so; violent though they may be, they come forth expected. The awkwardness of the ordeal stuck with him, the advent of seven years consummation, and he thought of the shadow frequently between the girl and the man and the space inside them and knew that he would go back to it, much like everything else.

Logically, he knows that the boy-Hero is something Normal, or was once, and that he had a coming and has a going, even with seven years blanked in dream-slate sleep. His own tabula rasa, clean and smooth as the infant mind, and Sheik is there to fill in the gaps - or that the girl-child inside made him say? But the boy can't remember the womb before the forest, and the girl can't remember anything at all, so Sheik feels something like life living for them, waiting for the world again.

In the end, he knows, there will be the girl and a boy and no room for the rags and that, he thinks, is something like motherhood, bringing children into the world made new and shiny and wiped clean of the smoke and ember of past life. And then he will die, and out of the womb of the shadow and into the earth and back to the darkness he will go (and will it be any different? he wonders), waiting to be born again, and that will be his spring.

He finds some peace in that.


	10. Boxed In PH SPOILERS

**Timeline:** Phantom Hourglass  
**Warnings:** PG   
**Characters:** Linebeck/Jolene  
**Theme:** word - gold

**WARNINGS: PHANTOM HOURGLASS SPOILERS AHEAD**

When she finds him, she will slit him sideways. There is no persuading her otherwise; Jolene is not a woman to be shaken like a loose sail, but firmly anchored to her cause - and Linebeck knows this well (and so does the crate), but there aren't the words to explain this to the boy. Not quite yet, anyway. There are still treasures to be had, a wish buried in his heart, a promise good as gold, so there is still comfort in the sharp click of sliding blades.

He, himself, has never tried the sword, so he cuts her down the only way a man can - skirting truth and dodgy words, and nothing seems to work to much avail, but he supposes that was always half the game. There is a sense of something left unfinished; a curious sensation he has no mind for, nor does he wish to dwell on the things he assumes past. She is stuck in a rut, a ship beached - so he says! - and this is not a route he is eager to follow.

Confrontation draws near; he can't run forever. He is on a collision course with world much bigger than his own, and the fear of being capsized and left drifting is heavy on his heart. The feeling settles deep in his gut like malady or sin (he can't decide which), seized by the sense of inevitable; he is not quite sure what he will do when there is nothing to separate them, no swords and no silence and no ocean between them, and he is terrified to think what she will take to make things split even.

But for now there is a boy and his ship and a crate, and for a time, he can afford to wait.


	11. The Clock Unwilling

**Timeline:** Majora's Mask  
**Warnings:** PG   
**Characters:** mild Kafei/Link, Kafei/Anju  
**Theme:** lyrics - "loneliness comes crashing in"

Loneliness comes crashing in around twelve o'clock, when the hands of the clock were intertwined, close as lovers and he is not. He is thinking of eternity in the bottom of amber glasses, and all the things size denies him. He is missing the bar and the babe - or something like it. He figures a man who can't love a woman marries the bottle, and trapped in this tormented circle of time winding back, there is nothing more compelling than an endless world of spinning (but the man behind the counter wouldn't give him that either).

Regret is a heady wine and a ready ink, so he writes letters about Something (now that time has cut him short of Everything) which he knows he'll never send, but it makes him feel better to think there is a woman out there who'd care to hear it. They still have false faces to trade, but the one he wears is no longer the one he wants her to see, so he thinks it's best if they become Nothing at the turn of the last light.

And then there is the boy (the boy, the boy, the boy who's not), and he puts a face to the words and mouth beneath the mask, and once again he is stripped - this time of Nothing, the solitude and ease of waiting for the time-ender. They make quite a pair, a fancy set of masks playing the part of Real Boys, but Kafei finds there is some condolence in the secrets that make up everything under the skin - a mask is nothing if there is nothing to hide, and between two boys who saw the world and came back, there is much to know, and somehow that makes Everything better.

After the fact, when the world is moving again, he'll decide that seven years is quite a long time; longer than three days, at the least, and maybe that it's something to have known a boy too much time too late and known him better than the rest -

- something good at least.


	12. Every New Beginning

**Timeline:** Windwaker  
**Warnings:** None  
**Characters:** Link (implied one-sided Link/Tetra)  
**Theme:** lyrics - "phantasmagoric monsters"

He knows that she hates mornings like wind hates water, crashing in mercilessly with a bellow and a shout, and that is why he pesters her mainly in evenings, when the word is settling sleepily against itself, hazy and horizontal. She is softer then, all of her thinking floating aimlessly around her, spread out weighty and lapsed beneath the girth of her conscience.

He likes to think himself a lesser bother, amidst all the heavy things inside her heart, but he knows that time and space frequently serve only to echo and enlarge the smaller concerns in life, and his attempts to wedge himself into the span of her affairs is not so subtle to go without notice. If he is to serve a grievance, he likes to think himself a productive sort, and he has bartered passage into her heart with promise of fortune, though of what kind he is uncertain. He would like to promise something, somewhere between the fumbling of his mouth and spirit, anything to place a value to his presence in her life, though she is short in her return.

Today he has failed to make much of himself; yesterday is a breath goodbye, and he wonders at the future spreading out like some phantasmagoric monster, steady and dreadful and bold before them, whether tomorrow he will be more than a bother that he was today and whether there is wealth in being noticed.

He supposes that will have to wait for evening.


	13. Bed of Roses, Bed of Thorns

**Title:** Bed of Roses, Bed of Thorns  
**Game:** Twilight Princess - one-sided Zelda/Ilia, implied Ilia/Link  
**Rating:** PG-13, adult references  
**Theme:** Pissed

At first it was letters, and she scribbled the Hylian alphabet in feverish circles around the ink well, blotted out furiously all the 'L' and 'I' and "YOU"s that made a heart and a home and put a meaning to the sterility of linguistics. She wanted a living tongue, a working play of histrionics, shrieking and accusations and all those desperate pieces that make things fall apart, but at first, all she had was her study and her parchment and the too quiet of a world without voice.

Soon the walls quivered with emotion, the air crackled with the words she couldn't say, the words the world wouldn't bear said, and she stormed every chamber and ransacked every good she had to their name long after there was no longer a name to be had for them. The flowers, neglected and despairing, wilted in her absence, and later she threw the vase over the balcony to crash somewhere in the garden below and thought viciously that it was better in the common dirt where it belonged, and went to make war upon the bed, too big and too open for a world writ in singular and past tense, and out the window it went too, frame upon pillows upon every living intimacy alive in the wrinkle of its sheets. Out, she wished it - OUT OUT! she screamed, and let all of their letters fly down in a tumult of white parchment rain, all of her hopes in discrete, unfinished pieces at the bottom of a ruined castle that no longer had a place for her.

Anger follows like a crow, irritable and peckish, constantly drilling in her ear; grief lowers like a shroud, but she will not see its triumph. Sometimes, she is fierce and hot and almost explosive -

"Do you remember the garden we tended?" she asks.

"What of the books you left behind?" she wonders.

"The bed in which I fucked you senseless?" she is honestly curious.

"Would he love you any better than I did?" she sneers and scorns and wishes otherwise.

She sits on a throne like a true queen, stiff and stunning and completely unattainable by any lesser hand (as to if you say, "mercy have the lady that turns her face aside!"), and tries not to think of how she has taken to burning books and tearing coverlets and all of the unseemly things a queen in love might do.


	14. Turning, Turning, We Come Round Right

**Title:** Turning, Turning, We Come 'Round Right  
**Game:** Twilight Princess, Alternate Universe - Zelda/Ilia/Telma  
**Warnings:** PG; mature themes  
**Theme:** fags

How do you fall in love with cigarettes and bubblegum?

This is Ilia's Question of the Decade, a sort of sudden shuffling of motives amidst other petty concerns (she knows, she knows - though she feels she's getting better). Last year it was, "What did Jesus know of loving if all he knew was love?" The year before that it was, "What is the missing tie between arithmetic and necrophilia?" (The answer, always, always, is forty-two.)

She scribbles in Sanskrit and babbles in foreign tongues - at least, it's all arcane speech to human ears, and she doubts Zelda passes the test for patience where her stuttering is concerned. But Zelda doesn't know (can't know, wouldn't know, couldn't care to know) about the woman at the bar, behind her fortress of ale and sentries of chipped glasses and all of the barriers age and circumstance has built her. She had looked so sad that day against the back alley wall, picking at gum stuck to the heels of her faded pumps and puffing listlessly at the end of a burnt-out fag, like if God had a moment to distill all of the agonies of unhappiness and prosaics in the bosom of Eve, he'd have placed her here in the grit and the smoky air of a cheap bar and called it Creation: The Second Act, better and more beautiful than any Adam could have hoped.

God, Ilia thinks, God has nothing on that torn leather shoe and the shaky clasp of that old corset, and neither does Zelda, with her perky breasts and perfect heels, and she is drowning in liquid fire and second-hand smoke.

How do you fall in love with cigarettes and bubblegum?

Fall in love with the woman first.


	15. Of Thee Only

**Game:** Ocarina of Time

**Pairings:** Link/Malon

**Ratings:** PG-13, sexual content

**Theme:** Adore

He always leaves his hat hanging on the door, like he is coming only in preparation to leave, and she tells him that she finds this habit of his quite adorable.

He frames her weeks like a tired bookend; he is always there only at the end and gone before the new beginning, and she can keep an easy count of time passing by the mark of his boots on her perpetually dusty floor. At times, he is more like a ghost than any tangible ephemera, as fleetingly dismissed as anything else at the turn of a hand, and she suspects this is more fitting than she'd like to admit, so she likes to leave it all a mess. (Sometimes she isn't sure if he comes at all, but what is the purpose of dust but to stir at a breath and hide what nobody wants to see?)

She adores the time he takes to visit her lonely, East-of-nowhere ranch and, once, tells him so - she gets a stammering grace and a small blush, as red as her hair, creeping across his adorable cheeks. As a reward, she kisses him on both - small and tart and chaste as apples against his skin, and the next time he visits, they fuck hard on the floor of her stable in an awkward muddle of limbs and murmurs and mouths. It turns out to be his first time - and hers too - and this is quite adorable in its own way, even if it said without words afterwards that it was all quite a mistake.

Nothing is better or more lovable than to adore and be adored, but this is just another mess he's made (he says, once) - and she slaps him for it, once on each cheek, because this not a mistake he was right to make (even though she wants to shake him and love him and fuck him and adore him again for everything he hasn't the strength to be, but god, oh god, she knows she can't).

She watches him leave, even as it tears at the parts of her left in the dust of the barn. She knows that this will be the last time she will find his hat on her door (or any place in her home) and vows to sweep away the ghosts she once adored from every nook and cranny and whatever else he's left behind. In the end, she supposes they will both be better for it, and maybe (maybe, maybe) what the scripture says is true -

- she will adore him only for the things he'll never say or do.


	16. A History of Sins

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess

**Warnings:** Implied intimacy.

**Characters: **Shad/Ilia

**Theme:** Word - fable

"Let me tell you a story," he says to her ear, which is not quite the same as to her face, but she understands that some fables easier to tell without sight, so she accepts this misdirected sort of telling.

"Let me tell you about heroes," he says another time, this time to her knee, which is sharp and angular against his chin, and he tells her all the things she didn't know about the man she'd grown to love growing up.

"Let me tell you about tragedy," he weaves a story about unrequited love against her empty belly, about queens and scholars and little farm girls who never knew better for what they had but fell in love with heroes all the same, and Ilia can't help but weep against his shoulder in a fit of hysteria, the kind of histrionics the notoriously insignificant bend to because that is their only hope of being noticed.

"Let me tell you about love," she says once, hot and explosive against his neck, "let me tell you about all the things you men of notes can't find in those papers, those studies, those pointless, _fucking_ books of yours."

"Let me tell you what it's like to be left in dusty pockets of non-existence," she says, "And I will show you what history is really about."

And for all the man that is, Shad listens.


	17. Empty Movement

**Timeline:** Majora's Mask

**Warnings:** Adult content, underage character.

**Characters:** Link/Anju

**Theme:** Word - dig

They are laying like lovers under the stars, though Anju is sure this makes her a whore or something worse to lie with a boy this young, but here they are, two centerpieces in the timework clock, watching the world fall apart.

"What do you think of the moon," she asks, as if it matters, as if anything put on this green, writhing mess of existence matters, and she puts a hand over his heart to pretend or maybe feel it still beating. She isn't sure what it is alive at this point, so close to the end, and 'it's only by uncertain means that we call exist at all,' she thinks, and the certainty of that assertion is what renders it nothing at the final stroke of midnight.

"I think of God," the little boy-who-is-not says because he is thinking of things whole and consuming, "I think of God swallowing me up and that is the way it is meant to be, I think. To live twice is nothing divine, and so it always falls apart."

"This is the world that is mine," he continues, because words are his new weapons, sharp and precise and they dig at the core of human non-existence, "We are in this moment, and I am your man unto you, your husband in arms when the call of time-ending comes, won't walk by my side in this apocalypse with me?"

"Nobody should face the world without clocks alone," Anju says, because that is what everybody fears most - an existence without time, without ticking, without patience. Nobody is born not waiting for death, but God, God, that is how love exists - a matter of timing and chance and patience; every good thing must end, and she is glad that this boy-Hero is by her side, this little failure of scripture and prophecy, so that all of her minuscule miscalculations can add up to zero by his side.

"The clock is ticking," he breaths against her neck, and Anju can do nothing but spread her thighs and pray for God and wish for a world beyond this world where ticking never stops.


	18. Castles Without Queens

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess

**Warnings:** Mild sexuality.

**Characters:** Zelda/Ilia

**Theme:** N/A

"What would you do without me?" Ilia said enthusiastically as she kissed her way up Zelda's leg. Ilia is never quite so cruel, but the inquiry hangs in the air: Marry well? Mother a few trollish children? (You would make a mockery of love without me! her kisses always seem to say.)

"I'd be a me without a you," Zelda said honestly stretching out over the bed, looking as whole and happy as purest love, because what else is there to do? A world without Ilia is a world without four corners and the shackle she's made herself, and she no longer knows what it looks like looking in. "What would I do without you?" because it is a question and an answer that bears repeating, like all of the petty things racked up inside her heart.

Maybe a marry a man, any sort of whore, the kind who come seeking a hand for great fortune and a place in the womb of a woman, but who wants that? Really wants it, the way drunkards are to divine ale or monks seek holy script, all those things good men can't bring? Trapped in this coordinative clockwork circles of suitors and councils and rolling courts, Zelda can only think of dusty fingernails and infrequent bathing, all those dirty things that make a common slut, though she would never want her love to feel that way.

"What are the letters that make 'I love you,'" she asks, half because she's drunk on love and half because she can't stand it.

"All the letters that spell your name," Ilia says, and makes a molehill of manly exploits.


	19. But They're Always Good For Running

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess (AU)  
**Warnings:** None.   
**Characters:** Ilia, Zelda  
**Theme:** lyrics - "tennis shoes aren't meant for tennis"  
**Author's Note:** This is an informal sequel to Chapter 14's "Turning, Turning, We Come Round Right."

"Tennis shoes aren't meant for tennis," Ilia says to Zelda one day while they are drinking on the deck. She is thinking this is something new, to say out loud what is otherwise assumed. Art is just mimetic speech in conceptual tongues, and Ilia is no artist, but she certainly is here to tell a story.

"I don't park in my driveway," she muses on another, "But I drive on the parkway. How crazy is that?" The world is sideways, backwards, upside-down and she hates it.

"Broken ankles are just God's way of saying high-heels are accidents in wait," just like snakes in the grass or falling in love, and she cries recklessly over back alleys and Zelda's perfectly scandalous, naked ankle draped over the bed.

"I don't think I'm in love with you anymore," she says and walks out of the door -

- and

out   
of   
her   
life.


	20. Big Crazies in Little Paradise

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess (massive AU)  
**Warnings:** Swearing, mature references, general mayhem.  
**Characters:** Link/Purlo, Zelda/Ilia  
**Theme:** phrase - ass antlers   
**Author's Notes:** The theme was derived from an argument regarding what the proper slang was for tattoos placed on the lower back - fondly recalled by most of us as "tramp stamps," though some of our non-American buddies took dissent to the, ah, nomenclature. Sadly, I cannot levy responsibility of this craziness on any sort of inebriation - just a generally pervasive sense of the typical silliness. If you want to see another author's take on these themes (from the same chat room, in fact!), head over to the webpage of author "an awesome blossom." She's got some explosively amazing work over there, and it is truly something worth experiencing.  
**Author's Notes (II):** For those who have read _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_, I'm sure you'll catch the obvious homage. All credit should be sent careening at ninety miles per hour via Red Shark to Hunter S. Thompson. (And if you haven't read it, do so and soon.)

"JESUS CHRIST, HOW MUCH DID WE DRINK LAST NIGHT?" Link screamed maniacally, poking ("ow, ow, ow, ow!" the chorus went) at his newest set of ass antlers, which had settled themselves pluckily against his left ass cheek in perfect union to its right ass cheek sister (in-law) and SCREAMED in a wildly frictional fantasia of cheap tattoo ink, "PROPERTY OF PURLO: DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200 UNTIL DADDY HAS A NEW CIRCUS TENT."

"Personally, I think it's HOT," Purlo yelled over the racket as Aerosmith rocked this way over airborne frequencies set to the high-pitched octave of HEAVY METAL and AND IT'S TOO LOUD, YOU'RE TOO OLD, MAN and Ilia rolled her eyes like Las Vegas jackpot dollar signs and waved emphatically to Zelda, who was 10.213 feet too far away wrapped up in serious meditation to the old school sound of Bob Dylan and obnoxious plaid print of an old couch.

"THERE IS TOO MUCH Y-CHROMOSOME GOING ON HERE." She battled Steven Tyler and came to a draw, and made a circular tumble of legs and body and drunken wheeling to the perpendicular heaven of 70s upholstery to curl like a cat against Zelda's side. She lifted a head phone and yelled, "WE CAN'T STAY HERE, THIS IS MAN COUNTRY."

"JESUS, I KNOW," Zelda and made a half-circle of petticoats around them both. "BUT THERE'S A WHOLD WORLD OUT THERE WITHOUT ASS-ANTLERS AND BOB DYLAN AND LESBIAN COUCHES, SO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO GO?"

So they didn't.


	21. That Burns Like Cigarettes

**Timeline:** Ocarina of Time (mild AU)  
**Warnings:** Adult references.  
**Characters:** Link/Malon  
**Theme:** lyrics for Cake's "Short Skirt, Long Jacket"

"It's called smooooooth liquidation," he says swaying toward her like a tiger on vaseline (better than David Bowie imagined!), dancing forward in a jaunty, ungraceful motion of inebriated hip thrusting and un-rhythm, the kind that would make music unwind to see it, but fuck sound-motion, fuck lyrics - all it does is make her laugh and that is something worth singing about.

He skirted the edge of the bed and its jutting sword sides, ready to cut hips and bruise egos, and collapsed into the pile of her pillows like a sack of lively, drunken potatoes. "I'm trading in my MG for a Chrysler Lebanon - shit, how did it go again?!"

"Hell if I know," she says, all downward motion, like a toppling Shiva - all flailing arms and feminine wile - collapsing with cement-brick-heavy on his chest, and that's all the weight he's willing and ready to bear right now, dizzy like a spinning top filled up with bubblegum rum, and he giggles almost like a girl when he feels her fingers preying on the tangled laces of his trousers while wishing for Shirley Temple cherries and martini olives.

Music fumbled in his mouth along with her hair and something that wanted a voice but didn't have one. It might have come out as "I love you," but Cake rambled manically, "I want a girl who cuts through ribbons with a machete - "

"I have a pitch fork," she grinned against his navel.

He knew that, but goddamnit, he wanted that machete -

- but alas!

(he falls in love with her anyway).


	22. Both Ends of the Tunnel

**Timeline:** Ocarina of Time (post-MM)  
**Warnings:** None  
**Characters:** Link  
**Theme:** phrase - "I haven't thought of you at all"

"I haven't thought of you at all," he says to the walls that seem closer every day, like old friends who can't stay away. The world curls around him like a fist, and Link knows - he knows, he knows, he knows - he must get out of this empty place, but where else could he go? Forever, he is Nothing here, and Nothing has nowhere to go but here.

Where else could he find Nowhere but in something, somewhere? He is No-Name and No-Face, and this is Nowhere Land, a place where people pass through time and mean Nothing more. Objects in motion, he thinks once, and then never again, because Nothing is no easier without a fate.

"I haven't thought of you at all," he says to emeralds and sapphire and ruby-locked doors to places and worlds that teeter on the edge of a sword.

But what lies beyond Nothing? (More Nothing, of course!)


	23. Out of Hemlock

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
**Warnings:** Mature themes.  
**Characters:** Ilia (implied pairing)  
**Theme:** none - but the intended was "domestication"  
**Author's Notes:** I have mixed feelings about this story. It was more inspired from a conversation in chat than the usual chat themes. I'm not completely satisfied with it, but I suppose its intentions are well articulated, if a bit discretely.

On the third morning of the third month of the third year of their marriage, Ilia awoke to find her husband speaking in tongues. Like strangers passing by, each word lingered in the space of her conscious, acknowledged but dismissed, heard but unheard in that slippery way of mistranslation. The world had changed somehow, moved forward with the aggressive forward motion of clocks, and here she sat in the middle of the torrential downpour of ticking like an idle hand or a broken gear. She felt unmoved: her hands bound, her mouth stitched shut, her words - if she had any - clumsily crossed space and time to fall on deaf ears. She was in a world without eyes or ears or self, and she was alone.

On the third morning of third month of the third year of her marriage, Ilia awoke to find traitors in her midst. Her children stared at her with hungry eyes, speaking in false tongues and wanting love she hadn't wanted to give. She was filled with a worthless wrath that had no tangible facets, no channel, no form - an all-consuming sense of having been unwittlingly shackled to little hands and little faces and little loves that had carved out a place in her all-too-crowded heart, leaving no space for her loves that felt altogether too little anymore.

"I do believe," she said in her mother-tongue, which hadn't purpose or a means in this foreign world of linguistic undoing, "that I have made a rather big mistake."

And she wants to be forgiven for sins she hasn't quite committed to, but she has a sense that this is nothing worth forgiving if she has no regrets, and what does she regret? but all the things she hasn't sinned for yet! Like the typhoon striking forests and putting castles to ruin, she is bound to leave a empty place in her wake, but she's been sure to fill it long enough, and now it's in her, brutal and excising and making empty spaces of her that she can't bridge with the Mother Directive (marry, fuck, fritter away), and it's all sorts of wrong inside and out, waiting to corrupt the Ilia that existed somewhere between the mother and the sin.

She fashions herself the new language of Smothered Selves - she found it somewhere in the bottom of empty rum glasses, amber and fire sweet - and that is something more like the girl she was meant to be, the woman she never was, the empty womb, the piecemeal heart full of fire that goes down easy - so she chases that golden directive down again and again and again and again -

- and again -

- and again and -

she dies  
- happy.


	24. Big Easy, Little Death

**Timeline:** It's either post-Majora's Mask or post-Phantom Hourglass. I couldn't decide.  
**Warnings:** Mature themes.  
**Characters:** Link  
**Theme:** Phrase "titillating titties." Yeah, I don't know what that has anything to do with this, either.

He's done the big-little thing in the big, big world, so he decides at age thirteen times three-sixty-five and a quarter year that he is greater than the sum of his parts and makes The Big Score the number one agenda of a new age post-fairy little-big boy. There's a big world out there, after all, and he's just tall enough these days and see up and over the little things, so he feels it's time to cast them aside (which is the Number One Lie of Boys-Who-Think-They-Are-Men).

The succession of adult principles goes as follow: manhood is an act of bartering what is paltry for greater pieces of the whole. In this way, daggers become swords, booze forgoes failure, love begets whores, and flying becomes synonymous for how far you can fall. He falls in love with big fortunes, big scores (count them up - whores come easy with big money - 1, 2, 3, 42 and that was the peak of it), big dreams that died heavy in his all-too-little heart.

This was the Big World as Grownups Knew It, and he was not prepared at all, at all, at all for the Big Costs it Came With, but he believes that he is happy.

He really does.


	25. Going Nowhere, Noplace Fast

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess  
**Warnings:** None.   
**Characters:** Ilia/? Reader's imagination.  
**Theme:** lyrics "cornbread fag." I can't recall the name of the song off the top of my head.

On Sunday, she thought: "I could pretend to still love you, if you could pretend we could get through this week."

On Monday, over coffee: "Don't leave the keys near the door. It makes for too easy an escape."

On Tuesday, burying her dead garden: "The problem with Nietzsche is that he's always too right."

On Wednesday, during lunch: "The real problem is that you're a cornbread fag, through and through: a little buttering up never made up for simplicity."

On Thursday, scrubbing kitchens: "I always knew it would come to this - the problem was trying not to care."

On Friday, while weeping: "What is the purpose of falling in love, if it's so easy to fall out of it?"

On Saturday, she said: "I think trying is just another way of cutting corners."

And so she didn't anymore.


	26. Neptune Spin

**Timeline:** Twilight Princess AU  
**Warnings:** None   
**Characters:** Ilia/Zelda  
**Theme:** word - stilettos

She remembers when this house played in singular: the movement and music of one woman quietly making her way through a black hole universe, an inert spacial mass with no known trajectory, making lazy revolution around unlivened rooms. That was before the pangalactic rhythm of Pink Floyd, before stilettos and shot-glass mosaic; all she breathes is plural now, if breathing could take the form of Sonny and Cher, Thelma and Louise, rocketing forward at emc2 infinity into the unknowns of asphyxiation.

She walks in a daze - tornadoes have more foresight than I, she thinks, spinning out of control and into a world of curvy double yang. She can't remember where her came in double-digit gymnastic splits - she doesn't remember, but she knows it right, meant to be, the way novels are never framed without a beginning or an end,

When did it become normal to find chardonnay on her shelf (she hates the stuff)? She doesn't know. When did it become proper to play piano naked? She doesn't care to know. When did two become the answer to life, the universe, and God(dess)? Oh God, who knows? It just doesn't seem to matter anymore.


	27. Threadbare

**Timeline:** Majora's Mask  
**Warnings:** None  
**Characters:** Link/Viscen  
**Theme:** nothing

Nothing really makes any sense at all. Not after the goddesses show him that arithmetic is a practice of fallacy, and he falls back seven years in a circle with no standard circumference to the self. This is the self that doesn't really exist any longer, he thinks, long after the sword has excised the pieces of he who was a boy - but a boy he is, and so agrees the clock in the town of endless ticking, the land of non-opportunity and other human things.

The guard at the gate has no face and no name in his world, but this is only fair, since this is a world where he had no face and no name, but they are still themselves - and that, THAT, is the most important variable of them all, independent of x raised to the second power, em cee squared, and other abuses of the time space continuum he might contemplate.

Because

because

If there is a place where you exist, faceless and nameless and bereft of the self...

Isn't that always where you were meant to be? 


	28. Deux Ex Machina

**Timeline:** Wind Waker  
**Warnings:** None  
**Characters:** The Hero of the Winds  
**Theme:** kinesis

He is a tornado, a twister of high velocity wind, cyclone force - in the islands, they'd called him the Wind Waker, but now he is the electric energy of sound space motion, cutting corners and undermining soft bellies at the edge of the blue steel sky sword. Master of the elements, king of the titan windbag - the boat of legends and red wood could mend his kingdom on self-doubt and gold lust, but he is the human grit stirring the hurricane punch. Sudden, cyclical SLICE! down goes the knight of no fancy, in bifolds the elemental sorcerer, stirring wickedness and boiled air, but he is no match for this wind tunnel, sound-motion-spin - off the edge of the map and into the world of monsters he's gone, and he's not coming back, but -

- in islands they called him the watching boy, fast and furious and bent for higher callings but now he is simply

kinesis;

wind warrior;

the god machine;

- Hero. 


End file.
